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Again, there is movement: all bodily movement is uniform;
failing an incorporeal soul, how account for diversity of
movement? Predilections, reasons, they will say; that is all very
well, but these already contain that variety and therefore cannot
belong to body which is one and simplex, and, besides, is not
participant in reason- that is, not in the sense here meant, but
only as it is influenced by some principle which confers upon it
the qualities of, for instance, being warm or cold.
Then there is growth under a time-law, and within a definite
limit: how can this belong strictly to body? Body can indeed be
brought to growth, but does not itself grow except in the sense
that in the material mass a capacity for growing is included as
an accessory to some principle whose action upon the body causes
growth.
Supposing the soul to be at once a body and the cause of growth,
then, if it is to keep pace with the substance it augments, it
too must grow; that means it must add to itself a similar bodily
material. For the added material must be either soul or soulless
body: if soul, whence and how does it enter, and by what process
is it adjoined [to the soul which by hypothesis is body]; if
soulless, how does such an addition become soul, falling into
accord with its precedent, making one thing with it, sharing the
stored impressions and notions of that initial soul instead,
rather, of remaining an alien ignoring all the knowledge laid up
before?
Would not such a soulless addition be subject to just such loss
and gain of substance, in fact to the non-identity, which marks
the rest of our material mass?
And, if this were so, how explain our memories or our recognition
of familiar things when we have no stably identical soul?
Assume soul to be a body: now in the nature of body,
characteristically divisible, no one of the parts can be
identical with the entire being; soul, then, is a thing of
defined size, and if curtailed must cease to be what it is; in
the nature of a quantitative entity this must be so, for, if a
thing of magnitude on diminution retains its identity in virtue
of its quality, this is only saying that bodily and
quantitatively it is different even if its identity consists in a
quality quite independent of quantity.
What answer can be made by those declaring soul to be corporeal?
Is every part of the soul, in any one body, soul entire, soul
perfectly true to its essential being? and may the same be said
of every part of the part? If so, the magnitude makes no
contribution to the soul's essential nature, as it must if soul
[as corporeal] were a definite magnitude: it is, as body cannot
be, an "all-everywhere," a complete identity present at each and
every point, the part all that the whole is.
To deny that every part is soul is to make soul a compound from
soulless elements. Further, if a definite magnitude, the double
limit of larger or smaller, is to be imposed upon each separate
soul, then anything outside those limits is no soul.
Now, a single coition and a single sperm suffice to a twin birth
or in the animal order to a litter; there is a splitting and
diverging of the seed, every diverging part being obviously a
whole: surely no honest mind can fail to gather that a thing in
which part is identical with whole has a nature which transcends
quantity, and must of necessity be without quantity: only so
could it remain identical when quantity is filched from it, only
by being indifferent to amount or extension, by being in essence
something apart. Thus the Soul and the Reason-Principles are
without quantity.
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